Olivier Mosset

The work of Olivier Mosset is confoundingly simple. For years, the Swiss artist painted geometric shapes, and then switched to monochromes, in colors often more associated with house paint than the fine arts. Founding member of "BMPT" with artists Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni, for a long period Mosset practiced a kind of programmatic painting so reductive in its physical aspect that the context came to the fore as part of the art itself. With BMPT (started in 1967), Mosset explored the language of circles, and the letter "A," but also swapped with the elemental signs of his partners in occasional works. As a compendium to this decisively non-painting painting method, so stark and essentialist as to render the surroundings even more visible, Mosset has begun to work in large outdoor sculpture, and even produced sets for the ballet. The supreme elegance of his compositions hide a strong current of irony, perhaps an element binding the artist to the work of his mentors, Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri.